OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Educational Measurement: Opportunities and Ethical Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in educational measurement has revolutionized assessment methods, enabling automated scoring, rapid content analysis, and personalized feedback through machine learning and natural language processing. These advancements provide timely, consistent feedback and valuable insights into student performance, thereby enhancing the assessment experience. However, the deployment of AI in education also raises significant ethical concerns regarding validity, reliability, transparency, fairness, and equity. Issues such as algorithmic bias and the opacity of AI decision-making processes pose risks of perpetuating inequalities and affecting assessment outcomes. Responding to these concerns, various stakeholders, including educators, policymakers, and organizations, have developed guidelines to ensure ethical AI use in education. The National Council of Measurement in Education's Special Interest Group on AI in Measurement and Education (AIME) also focuses on establishing ethical standards and advancing research in this area. In this paper, a diverse group of AIME members examines the ethical implications of AI-powered tools in educational measurement, explores significant challenges such as automation bias and environmental impact, and proposes solutions to ensure AI's responsible and effective use in education.
A Universal Railway Obstacle Detection System based on Semi-supervised Segmentation And Optical Flow
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Detecting obstacles in railway scenarios is both crucial and challenging due to the wide range of obstacle categories and varying ambient conditions such as weather and light. Given the impossibility of encompassing all obstacle categories during the training stage, we address this out-of-distribution (OOD) issue with a semi-supervised segmentation approach guided by optical flow clues. We reformulate the task as a binary segmentation problem instead of the traditional object detection approach. To mitigate data shortages, we generate highly realistic synthetic images using Segment Anything (SAM) and YOLO, eliminating the need for manual annotation to produce abundant pixel-level annotations. Additionally, we leverage optical flow as prior knowledge to train the model effectively. Several experiments are conducted, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.
Evaluating AI Group Fairness: a Fuzzy Logic Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial intelligence systems often address fairness concerns by evaluating and mitigating measures of group discrimination, for example that indicate biases against certain genders or races. However, what constitutes group fairness depends on who is asked and the social context, whereas definitions are often relaxed to accept small deviations from the statistical constraints they set out to impose. Here we decouple definitions of group fairness both from the context and from relaxation-related uncertainty by expressing them in the axiomatic system of Basic fuzzy Logic (BL) with loosely understood predicates, like encountering group members. We then evaluate the definitions in subclasses of BL, such as Product or Lukasiewicz logics. Evaluation produces continuous instead of binary truth values by choosing the logic subclass and truth values for predicates that reflect uncertain context-specific beliefs, such as stakeholder opinions gathered through questionnaires. Internally, it follows logic-specific rules to compute the truth values of definitions. We show that commonly held propositions standardize the resulting mathematical formulas and we transcribe logic and truth value choices to layperson terms, so that anyone can answer them. We also use our framework to study several literature definitions of algorithmic fairness, for which we rationalize previous expedient practices that are non-probabilistic and show how to re-interpret their formulas and parameters in new contexts.
A Road Less Travelled and Beyond: Towards a Roadmap for Integrating Sustainability into Computing Education
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Education for sustainable development has evolved to include more constructive approaches and a better understanding of what is needed to align education with the cultural, societal, and pedagogical changes required to avoid the risks posed by an unsustainable society. This evolution aims to lead us toward viable, equitable, and sustainable futures. However, computing education, including software engineering, is not fully aligned with the current understanding of what is needed for transformational learning in light of our current challenges. This is partly because computing is primarily seen as a technical field, focused on industry needs. Until recently, sustainability was not a high priority for most businesses, including the digital sector, nor was it a prominent focus for higher education institutions and society. Given these challenges, we aim to propose a research roadmap to integrate sustainability principles and essential skills into the crowded computing curriculum, nurturing future software engineering professionals with a sustainability mindset. We conducted two extensive studies: a systematic review of academic literature on sustainability in computing education and a survey of industry professionals on their interest in sustainability and desired skills for graduates. Using insights from these studies, we identified key topics for teaching sustainability, including core sustainability principles, values and ethics, systems thinking, impact measurement, soft skills, business value, legal standards, and advocacy. Based on these findings, we will develop recommendations for future computing education programs that emphasise sustainability. The paper is accepted at the 2030 Software Engineering workshop, which is co-located with the FSE'24 conference.
A Treatment of EIP-1559: Enhancing Transaction Fee Mechanism through Nth-Price Auction
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

With the widespread adoption of blockchain technology, the transaction fee mechanism (TFM) in blockchain systems has become a prominent research topic. An ideal TFM should satisfy user incentive compatibility (UIC), miner incentive compatibility (MIC), and miner-user side contract proofness ($c$-SCP). However, state-of-the-art works either fail to meet these three properties simultaneously or only satisfy them under certain conditions. In this paper, we propose a burning $N$-price auction TFM named BNP. This mechanism divides the transaction fee into a base fee, which is burned, and a priority fee, which is allocated to miners. Theoretical proofs and experimental analyses demonstrate that, even under conditions of significant transaction congestion, this mechanism satisfies UIC, MIC, and $c$-SCP simultaneously. Furthermore, the BNP mechanism is not constrained by the type of blockchain consensus, making it widely applicable.
DNLSAT: A Dynamic Variable Ordering MCSAT Framework for Nonlinear Real Arithmetic
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2024
Year: 2024

Satisfiability modulo nonlinear real arithmetic theory (SMT(NRA)) solving is essential to multiple applications, including program verification, program synthesis and software testing. In this context, recently model constructing satisfiability calculus (MCSAT) has been invented to directly search for models in the theory space. Although following papers discussed practical directions and updates on MCSAT, less attention has been paid to the detailed implementation. In this paper, we present an efficient implementation of dynamic variable orderings of MCSAT, called dnlsat. We show carefully designed data structures and promising mechanisms, such as branching heuristic, restart, and lemma management. Besides, we also give a theoretical study of potential influences brought by the dynamic variablr ordering. The experimental evaluation shows that dnlsat accelerates the solving speed and solves more satisfiable instances than other state-of-the-art SMT solvers. Demonstration Video: https://youtu.be/T2Z0gZQjnPw Code: https://github.com/yogurt-shadow/dnlsat/tree/master/code Benchmark https://zenodo.org/records/10607722/files/QF_NRA.tar.zst?download=1
Snakes and Ladders: Two Steps Up for VideoMamba
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Video understanding requires the extraction of rich spatio-temporal representations, which transformer models achieve through self-attention. Unfortunately, self-attention poses a computational burden. In NLP, Mamba has surfaced as an efficient alternative for transformers. However, Mamba's successes do not trivially extend to vision tasks, including those in video analysis. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the differences between self-attention and Mamba. We identify two limitations in Mamba's token processing: historical decay and element contradiction. We propose VideoMambaPro (VMP) that solves the identified limitations by adding masked backward computation and elemental residual connections to a VideoMamba backbone. Differently sized VideoMambaPro models surpass VideoMamba by 1.6-2.8% and 1.1-1.9% top-1 on Kinetics-400 and Something-Something V2, respectively. Even without extensive pre-training, our models present an increasingly attractive and efficient alternative to current transformer models. Moreover, our two solutions are orthogonal to recent advances in Vision Mamba models, and are likely to provide further improvements in future models.
SimpleFusion: A Simple Fusion Framework for Infrared and Visible Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Integrating visible and infrared images into one high-quality image, also known as visible and infrared image fusion, is a challenging yet critical task for many downstream vision tasks. Most existing works utilize pretrained deep neural networks or design sophisticated frameworks with strong priors for this task, which may be unsuitable or lack flexibility. This paper presents SimpleFusion, a simple yet effective framework for visible and infrared image fusion. Our framework follows the decompose-and-fusion paradigm, where the visible and the infrared images are decomposed into reflectance and illumination components via Retinex theory and followed by the fusion of these corresponding elements. The whole framework is designed with two plain convolutional neural networks without downsampling, which can perform image decomposition and fusion efficiently. Moreover, we introduce decomposition loss and a detail-to-semantic loss to preserve the complementary information between the two modalities for fusion. We conduct extensive experiments on the challenging benchmarks, verifying the superiority of our method over previous state-of-the-arts. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/hxwxss/SimpleFusion-A-Simple-Fusion-Framework-for-Infrared-and-Visible-Images}{https://github.com/hxwxss/SimpleFusion-A-Simple-Fusion-Framework-for-Infrared-and-Visible-Images}
STBench: Assessing the Ability of Large Language Models in Spatio-Temporal Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) holds promise for reforming the methodology of spatio-temporal data mining. However, current works for evaluating the spatio-temporal understanding capability of LLMs are somewhat limited and biased. These works either fail to incorporate the latest language models or only focus on assessing the memorized spatio-temporal knowledge. To address this gap, this paper dissects LLMs' capability of spatio-temporal data into four distinct dimensions: knowledge comprehension, spatio-temporal reasoning, accurate computation, and downstream applications. We curate several natural language question-answer tasks for each category and build the benchmark dataset, namely STBench, containing 13 distinct tasks and over 60,000 QA pairs. Moreover, we have assessed the capabilities of 13 LLMs, such as GPT-4o, Gemma and Mistral. Experimental results reveal that existing LLMs show remarkable performance on knowledge comprehension and spatio-temporal reasoning tasks, with potential for further enhancement on other tasks through in-context learning, chain-of-though prompting, and fine-tuning. The code and datasets of STBench are released on https://github.com/LwbXc/STBench.
Dancing in the Shadows: Harnessing Ambiguity for Fairer Classifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces a novel approach to bolster algorithmic fairness in scenarios where sensitive information is only partially known. In particular, we propose to leverage instances with uncertain identity with regards to the sensitive attribute to train a conventional machine learning classifier. The enhanced fairness observed in the final predictions of this classifier highlights the promising potential of prioritizing ambiguity (i.e., non-normativity) as a means to improve fairness guarantees in real-world classification tasks.
SubLock: Sub-Circuit Replacement based Input Dependent Key-based Logic Locking for Robust IP Protection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Intellectual Property (IP) piracy, overbuilding, reverse engineering, and hardware Trojan are serious security concerns during integrated circuit (IC) development. Logic locking has proven to be a solid defence for mitigating these threats. The existing logic locking techniques are vulnerable to SAT-based attacks. However, several SAT-resistant logic locking methods are reported; they require significant overhead. This paper proposes a novel input dependent key-based logic locking (IDKLL) that effectively prevents SAT-based attacks with low overhead. We first introduce a novel idea of IDKLL, where a design is locked such that it functions correctly for all input patterns only when their corresponding valid key sequences are applied. In contrast to conventional logic locking, the proposed IDKLL method uses multiple key sequences (instead of a single key sequence) as a valid key that provides correct functionality for all inputs. Further, we propose a sub-circuit replacement based IDKLL approach called SubLock that locks the design by replacing the original sub-circuitry with the corresponding IDKLL based locked circuit to prevent SAT attack with low overhead. The experimental evaluation on ISCAS benchmarks shows that the proposed SubLock mitigates the SAT attack with high security and reduced overhead over the well-known existing methods.
Understanding the Security Benefits and Overheads of Emerging Industry Solutions to DRAM Read Disturbance
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

We present the first rigorous security, performance, energy, and cost analyses of the state-of-the-art on-DRAM-die read disturbance mitigation method, Per Row Activation Counting (PRAC), described in JEDEC DDR5 specification's April 2024 update. Unlike prior state-of-the-art that advises the memory controller to periodically issue refresh management (RFM) commands, which provides the DRAM chip with time to perform refreshes, PRAC introduces a new back-off signal. PRAC's back-off signal propagates from the DRAM chip to the memory controller and forces the memory controller to 1) stop serving requests and 2) issue RFM commands. As a result, RFM commands are issued when needed as opposed to periodically, reducing RFM's overheads. We analyze PRAC in four steps. First, we define an adversarial access pattern that represents the worst-case for PRAC's security. Second, we investigate PRAC's configurations and security implications. Our analyses show that PRAC can be configured for secure operation as long as no bitflip occurs before accessing a memory location 10 times. Third, we evaluate the performance impact of PRAC and compare it against prior works using Ramulator 2.0. Our analysis shows that while PRAC incurs less than 13% performance overhead for today's DRAM chips, its performance overheads can reach up to 94% for future DRAM chips that are more vulnerable to read disturbance bitflips. Fourth, we define an availability adversarial access pattern that exacerbates PRAC's performance overhead to perform a memory performance attack, demonstrating that such an adversarial pattern can hog up to 94% of DRAM throughput and degrade system throughput by up to 95%. We discuss PRAC's implications on future systems and foreshadow future research directions. To aid future research, we open-source our implementations and scripts at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/ramulator2.
Fairness and Bias in Multimodal AI: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The importance of addressing fairness and bias in artificial intelligence (AI) systems cannot be over-emphasized. Mainstream media has been awashed with news of incidents around stereotypes and other types of bias in many of these systems in recent years. In this survey, we fill a gap with regards to the relatively minimal study of fairness and bias in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) compared to Large Language Models (LLMs), providing 50 examples of datasets and models related to both types of AI along with the challenges of bias affecting them. We discuss the less-mentioned category of mitigating bias, preprocessing (with particular attention on the first part of it, which we call preuse). The method is less-mentioned compared to the two well-known ones in the literature: intrinsic and extrinsic mitigation methods. We critically discuss the various ways researchers are addressing these challenges. Our method involved two slightly different search queries on two reputable search engines, Google Scholar and Web of Science (WoS), which revealed that for the queries 'Fairness and bias in Large Multimodal Models' and 'Fairness and bias in Large Language Models', 33,400 and 538,000 links are the initial results, respectively, for Scholar while 4 and 50 links are the initial results, respectively, for WoS. For reproducibility and verification, we provide links to the search results and the citations to all the final reviewed papers. We believe this work contributes to filling this gap and providing insight to researchers and other stakeholders on ways to address the challenges of fairness and bias in multimodal and language AI.
Statements: Universal Information Extraction from Tables with Large Language Models for ESG KPIs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) KPIs assess an organization's performance on issues such as climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, waste management, human rights, diversity, and policies. ESG reports convey this valuable quantitative information through tables. Unfortunately, extracting this information is difficult due to high variability in the table structure as well as content. We propose Statements, a novel domain agnostic data structure for extracting quantitative facts and related information. We propose translating tables to statements as a new supervised deep-learning universal information extraction task. We introduce SemTabNet - a dataset of over 100K annotated tables. Investigating a family of T5-based Statement Extraction Models, our best model generates statements which are 82% similar to the ground-truth (compared to baseline of 21%). We demonstrate the advantages of statements by applying our model to over 2700 tables from ESG reports. The homogeneous nature of statements permits exploratory data analysis on expansive information found in large collections of ESG reports.
Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

The fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life both question what life is and how it emerges from a distinct set of "pre-life" dynamics. One common feature of most substrates where life emerges is a marked shift in dynamics when self-replication appears. While there are some hypotheses regarding how self-replicators arose in nature, we know very little about the general dynamics, computational principles, and necessary conditions for self-replicators to emerge. This is especially true on "computational substrates" where interactions involve logical, mathematical, or programming rules. In this paper we take a step towards understanding how self-replicators arise by studying several computational substrates based on various simple programming languages and machine instruction sets. We show that when random, non self-replicating programs are placed in an environment lacking any explicit fitness landscape, self-replicators tend to arise. We demonstrate how this occurs due to random interactions and self-modification, and can happen with and without background random mutations. We also show how increasingly complex dynamics continue to emerge following the rise of self-replicators. Finally, we show a counterexample of a minimalistic programming language where self-replicators are possible, but so far have not been observed to arise.
Evidential Concept Embedding Models: Towards Reliable Concept Explanations for Skin Disease Diagnosis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Due to the high stakes in medical decision-making, there is a compelling demand for interpretable deep learning methods in medical image analysis. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBM) have emerged as an active interpretable framework incorporating human-interpretable concepts into decision-making. However, their concept predictions may lack reliability when applied to clinical diagnosis, impeding concept explanations' quality. To address this, we propose an evidential Concept Embedding Model (evi-CEM), which employs evidential learning to model the concept uncertainty. Additionally, we offer to leverage the concept uncertainty to rectify concept misalignments that arise when training CBMs using vision-language models without complete concept supervision. With the proposed methods, we can enhance concept explanations' reliability for both supervised and label-efficient settings. Furthermore, we introduce concept uncertainty for effective test-time intervention. Our evaluation demonstrates that evi-CEM achieves superior performance in terms of concept prediction, and the proposed concept rectification effectively mitigates concept misalignments for label-efficient training. Our code is available at https://github.com/obiyoag/evi-CEM.
BackMix: Mitigating Shortcut Learning in Echocardiography with Minimal Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Neural networks can learn spurious correlations that lead to the correct prediction in a validation set, but generalise poorly because the predictions are right for the wrong reason. This undesired learning of naive shortcuts (Clever Hans effect) can happen for example in echocardiogram view classification when background cues (e.g. metadata) are biased towards a class and the model learns to focus on those background features instead of on the image content. We propose a simple, yet effective random background augmentation method called BackMix, which samples random backgrounds from other examples in the training set. By enforcing the background to be uncorrelated with the outcome, the model learns to focus on the data within the ultrasound sector and becomes invariant to the regions outside this. We extend our method in a semi-supervised setting, finding that the positive effects of BackMix are maintained with as few as 5% of segmentation labels. A loss weighting mechanism, wBackMix, is also proposed to increase the contribution of the augmented examples. We validate our method on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets, demonstrating significant improvements in classification accuracy, region focus and generalisability. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/kitbransby/BackMix